Android set to take over the world

55 million to be sold by end of 2010

Smart phones running Google's Android operating system will soon dominate the world market according to research carried out by Digitimes.

The Taiwanese tech news site reckons global smartphone shipments will reach 280 million units by the end of 2010, and more than 55 million of those will feature the increasingly-popular open source OS.

Android's market share has rocketed from less than five per cent in 2009 to nearly 14 per cent this year. And, as the OS matures the bean counters at Digitimes reckon that Android-based smartphone sales will jump a whopping 561 per cent, pushing its market share up to 24.5  per cent by the end of the year, if the operation's soothsayers know their onions.

RIM's well-documented international woes, the apparent inability of Microsoft to make a decent fist of Windows 7 Mobile and the iPhone 4's shonky antenna have done little to halt the inexorable rise of the young pretender to the app phone throne.